The demand for efficient and prompt customer support in various types of industries has created a need for enhanced call center efficiency. Many large industries rely on call centers to provide responsive customer support. Accordingly, common goals of these organizations include reduction of customer hold time, improved network utilization, and improved call processing flow.
Current call distribution systems currently rely heavily on interactive voice response (IVR) units and their applications to determine treatment received by incoming calls. Calls arrive at an IVR after having been processed by an automatic call distributor (ACD). Current IVR systems include an electronic work force (EWF) component in conjunction with a speech recognition engine and often run over one hundred different applications to process a customer's requests. The voice network assigns and ACD delivers identifying information such as a dialed number (DN) and dialed number identification service (DNIS) to each call. The identifying information includes objective information about the call. The ACD communicates the DN and/or other call data that indicate a call type to the IVR. Additional caller data associated with the caller placing the call, such as subscriber or account number may also be captured to assist in determining call treatment. For example, caller data may include call-entered data (CED) such as digits entered on a telephone touch-pad in response to voice prompts. Thus, a given call may be discriminated by call data such as a DN or caller number, as well as by caller data or a combination thereof.
Upon receiving the call type and/or other call information, the IVR searches an internally hard-coded dialed number identification service (DNIS) table or other stored rules within the IVR to identify an appropriate treatment for the incoming call and processes the call using a coded technique appropriate for the call type. If desired, the caller can request another service through the speech recognition engine to cause the call to follow an alternate path specified by stored rules within the IVR.
After transfer to a particular call center site is requested, the IVR uses coded routing logic stored within the IVR to define an IVR exit condition and a new call destination. The IVR represents the routing decision as a subtype and returns the subtype with the call to the destination ACD. The ACD removes the call from the IVR and continues call processing based on exit instructions for the subtype.
The process as described above can be unsatisfactorily slow and additionally requires IVR code modifications whenever treatment for a call type is changed. Accordingly a solution is needed that expedites request processing and optimizes IVR code while avoiding frequent IVR code modifications. Additionally, a solution is needed that allows tracking of call processing within an IVR application.